August 16, 1981

Girl Mothers

By ANNE TYLER

BABY LOVE
By Joyce Maynard.

t is more than eight years since Joyce Maynard wrote "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks
Back on Life," her wry New York Times magazine article about growing up among the
jaded youth of the 60's. "Baby Love," her first novel, is an entirely different sort of work-
-it covers several days in the lives of a group of young girls in New Hampshire--but
there's much in it that recalls "Looking Back." The tone is the same: right on target, cued
to the rangy, slangy rhythms of modern life, though lacking the embarrassing archness
that characterized the earlier piece. There is the same acute awareness of the present
moment, or at least, of the present moment as perceived by the public. Television is a
constant force. So are sensational headlines, self-improvement articles, pop heroes, rock
songs and glossy advertisements.

Of the four young girls we meet on the first page, three have babies and the fourth is
pregnant. Only one is married. Only one is older than 16. The mothers love their
babies, but often in a childlike way, as if the babies were no more than unusually realistic
dolls to be dressed up and shown off, to have their hair tied in ribbons. Pregnancy is an
occasion for lending around some "cute tops" for maternity wear. The girl who is newly
pregnant worries that now she'll have trouble finding a date for the prom. And to at least
one girl--unwed, the product of a broken home, impregnated on her date by a boy she's
never talked with since--having a baby means having someone who loves her for the first
time in her life.

The book starts out, then, as a kind of informal sociological study, focusing on a group of
poorly equipped, poorly educated young people with limited dreams, their visions of the
ideal formed by what they glimpse on TV and in popular magazines. It is a pleasure,
almost a voyeuristic pleasure, to observe the details of their lives as catalogued here: the
teenaged wife's Harlequin Parfaits, made according to a recipe on the back of a Cool
Whip package, and her pigs-in-a-blanket and her Duncan Hines cake pepped up with a
box of Jell-O chocolate pudding; the K-Mart baby portraits; the bowling dates; the slam-
bam-thank-you-ma'am sex; and the carefully filled-in scrapbook ("Major events of Birth
Day: Author of "Born Free" found dead, believed to have been mauled by a lion.")

It is, above all, a disquieting look at the separateness and the loneliness sometimes
experienced between the sexes--and most particularly, between new parents. Having a
baby, one mother thinks, "is like getting on a train, taking a long trip while your husband
stays home (and who knows if you ever return?)." Her bewildered boy husband, though
he strikes us initially as callous, ponders his situation in a passage that rings touchingly
true:

"He hasn't forgotten why he wanted to get married, how good it feels to wake up in the
morning curled around her. . . . He liked buying an insurance policy and having Sandy's
name to write on the line that said Beneficiary. . . . But instead of making him feel more
like a man, Sandy sometimes makes him feel like a little boy. Twice he has called her
Mom by mistake. And one time, for a couple of seconds there, he couldn't remember
what his son's name was."

Unfortunately, Joyce Maynard takes her plot beyond its natural boundaries. Not content
to confine herself to the story of four young blue-collar mothers and mothers-to-be, she
veers to include a trendy unmarried couple from New York City, complete with Cuisinart
and Marimekko floor cushions. She sees fit to add a woman working through a nervous
breakdown over a failed love affair, gorging on honey yogurt and granola day after day
and then sticking a finger down her throat.

There's also a psychopathic killer who once kept a woman in sexual slavery for three
years, so isolating her from the outside world that "she didn't even know Ed Sullivan had
died." And a deranged grandmother who is hunting for a miraculous machine to
stimulate her breast milk so she can kidnap her grandchild and feed her properly. And a
child, raised in a childbirth-obsessed commune, who winds a piece of toilet paper around
her neck and plays a game of Prolapsed Umbilical Cord. Then there's the girl on vacation
from a private school in which an entire drawer in the Lost and Found is filled with
nothing but cocaine spoons. . . .

Things go too far, in other words. Zaniness intrudes; wacky comedy makes its clanging
entrance. The pathetic sincerity of the original four characters (and of the boy-husband,
and of the wistful father of one of the girls) is obliterated by the hitch-hiker with her YSL
tote bags. It's a pity, because the heart of "Baby Love" is a very fine book indeed. When
Joyce Maynard talks about ordinary life--the Jell-O and the Pampers and the baby's five-
month birthday party complete with Holly Hobbit paper tablecloth--she shows herself to
be a writer of uncommon promise. She has an unswerving eye, a sharply perked ear, and
the ability to keep her readers hanging on her words.